Corporate sites bury investor information

New Zealand’s top companies focus their websites too much on marketing and bury their investor relations content, the organisers of the 2008 Wired Best Investor Website Awards say.

Inernational best practice suggested that online marketing and investors relations were separate but equally important strategies to develop online, organisers said.
Wired consultant Bruce Russell said that particularly when investors were becoming increasingly skittish, companies should be doing all they could to make it attractive for them to look at a company.

Investors expected to be able to go to a company’s website and easily locate all the information they needed to make an investment choice.
But in many local cases they had to dig around on the site to find information.
“The message that gives to investors is that their requirements are not front of mind,” he said.

Overseas, some companies had two different or dual entry sites for consumers and investors. This could be a good strategy for local companies to develop, Mr Russell said. “Some home pages are just doing too many things.”
The Best Investor Website awards rank the home pages of companies from the NZX50 index.

Although many of these companies updated their websites in the past year, award organisers found it wasn’t always for the better.

Fifteen companies substantially redesigned their home pages in the last year but only eight of those improved their award ranking as a result. The rest actually scored worse in user experiences.

“Money spent on websites without consideration for the needs of web users is money wasted,” the award organisers said.

On the other hand, companies whose sites were largely unchanged scored on average five points less than last year.

“Letting your site lie is not an option,” award organisers said.

The number of unchanged websites fell by about 5 per cent on the previous year to 35 companies. This was put down to web 2.0 developments, with greater pick up of interactive features such as live data and RSS feeds.

Hellaby Holdings took out the top award for its website, thanks to a live feed of stockmarket data and clear information on its corporate strategy.
AMP and Port of Tauranga rounded out the top three.

The best improvers from the NZX50 were AMP (28th to 2nd), Fisher and Paykel Appliances (49th to 19th) and the NZX (42nd to 16th).

The largest companies on the index scored slightly higher than the average, but having a big budget was not important to the end result, organisers said.

Companies from the NZX15 averaged a score of 71.5, just ahead of the 69.5 overall average. Only two NZX15 companies ranked in the top 10.

The most successful sites included the following features:
- live data feeds showing the current share pric;e
- a central navigation menu including clear headings equivalent to ‘about us’ and ‘investor centre’;
- links to updated news about the company;
- stated what the company actually does; and
- comprehensive contact details